About NRG-5

Description

The NRG-5 project envisages contributing to the 5G PPP/5G Initiative research and development activities and participation at the relevant 5G Working Groups by delivering a novel 5G-PPP compliant, decentralized, secure and resilient framework, with highly availability able to homogeneously model and virtualize multi-homed, static or moving, hardware constrained (smart energy) devices, edge computing resources and elastic virtualized services over electricity and gas infrastructure assets combined with the telecommunications infrastructure covering the full spectrum of the communication and computational needs.

Ultimate goal:The ultimate project goal is to render the deployment, operation and management of existing and new communications and energy infrastructures(in the context of the Smart Energy-as-a-Service)easier, safer, more secure and resilient from an operational and financial point of view.

NRG-5 is unique

NRG-5 is unique, in contributing to the 5G PPP working groups:

• Vision & Societal Challenges WG with the vision of 5G based, secure, resilient and highly available smart energy as a service, along with CI-SLAs based business models
• Architecture WG with an end-to-end secure 5G-PPP compliant reference architecture covering from the electricity and gas smart meter/drone level right up to a (mirco-)cloud monitoring level, developing concrete solutions with real-time performance and high-availability.
• Security WG with a novel concept of decentralized scalable, secure and vendor lock-in free plug ‘n’ play and identity management mechanism, combining self-* and MCM, low level encryption functions and ledger technology in a concrete VNF solution, which may be applied to any utility (e.g. water, transport) and to a huge number of IoT.
• Software Networks WG with a micro-cloud xMEC open source software stack, facilitating automated analytics-based deployment of MTC-related and utility-centric VNFs and an extended 5G ETSI-MANO framework integrating analytics in the orchestration and management processes addressing smart energy applications’ VNF optimal sizing and chaining.
• Use cases & performance evaluation models WG (newly created) with smart energy use case and state of the art laboratories that combine VNF software stacks, IoT/5G radio and energy real
trials and emulations.
• Trials WG (newly created) with multi-RAT (cellular, IoT/MTC and satellite) communications and real energy (electricity and gas) infrastructures.
• Activity Community building and Public Relations with a significant ecosystem, of industrial, academic, telcos and utility operators to discuss and validate that 5G can decisively advance security and efficient operation of ultra-critical infrastuctures, such as the energy grids.

NRG-5 Vision

The NRG-5 Vision is shown in the figure below. At the lower level we may see the smart energy (electricity & gas) layer, composed of varying energy infrastructure assets. Over this layer, we consider the telecommunications network, compiled of cellular and mini-cells, IoT and satellite communications. NRG-5 framework is positioned over these layers. Following the 5G Architecture vision, it consists of a number of VNFs offering IaaS, Self* functions and smart energy specific VNFs. At the higher later, NRG-5 introduces mechanisms for xMEC offloading, elastic VNF sizing and chaining, M2M/MCM communications and trusted/scalable Plug ‘n’ play. All these activities are coordinated and supervised by a CI-SLA monitor and enforcement entity. As proof of context, NRG-5 considers many novel utility functions offered following the “X as a Service” approach, separated by an Open Northbound API (NBI). In order to realize the above vision, NRG-5 will research and innovate towards a number of developments and 5G PPP contributions.